4 ms·

So... the punchline here seems to be the median revenue per content creator. Except: 1) The denominator is skewed by a large number of people who signed up but

by Lazare 5y ago

So... the punchline here seems to be the median revenue per content creator. Except: 1) The denominator is skewed by a large number of people who signed up but aren't seriously pursuing it, and may not even be active. 2) The numerator is skewed by the fact that this omits tips entirely, and much of the sample is missing the subscription price or the number of subscribers, so numbers had to be guessed. So in other words, the $145/mo was calculated by taking one number we know is wrong, and dividing by another number we know is wrong. ...offhand, I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. I have to give props to the author; they're quite clear in the analysis section that they're missing all the data they need ("...many accounts don't have their number of fans available", "[using likes] as a proxy for number of fans [...] is likely an underestimate", many accounts had several subscription tiers). But given all the caveats, I don't think there's anything left to conclude.

formerly_proven 5y ago
It seems more like a Fermi estimate.
- hansvm 5y ago
  > I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. > Fermi estimate It's more like a Fermi estimate, but the inputs still probably aren't good enough to be meaningful. E.g., on other set-your-own-hours platforms like doordash, MLM pyramid schemes, and uber it's expected that 99% of the workers won't work more than a few hours per month (this is also a bad Fermi estimate -- could be off by 10x either direction). As a corollary, just taking the $145 and multiplying by 100ish (based also on your definition of full-time) could be a much better estimate for the earnings potential for somebody looking to seriously pursue OnlyFans. Pendantic note: the point here isn't that $14,500 is a better estimate; it's that the magnitude of all the unknowns in trying to compute such a thing is so great that we can't even reach the level of certainty a Fermi approximation provides without more data.
vbtemp 5y ago
Yeah, I read that over too - crap data in, crap analysis, and crap results out. There's a lot that's wrong with the article: - Someone else in this thread correctly highlighted that on stackoverflow, for example, simply having one answer to a question puts you in the top 25th percentile. Most accounts are probably idle or passive or abandoned, so using those to get the result is obviously wrong. Maybe, what are the expected earnings for users investing more than 8 hours/week (purchasing equipment, producing content, editing, publishing, marketing)? - People on this thread need to stop looking at the $145/month figure from the title. It doesn't come from anything. A lot of people are kind of stuck on that. By no means what so ever should it be interpreted as "girls who have only fans make $145/month", which people seem to be doing. Based on the income distribution, virtually no one makes approximately $145/month. It's just an artifact being the quotient of two numbers the author chose. A small-ish proportion of total users make _way more than $145/month_, and a large proportion of the user base (including idle and abandoned accounts) makes pretty much zero. Maybe I'm just broadcasting my lack of statistical knowledge, but I'm struggling to understand what does an average or median even signify for extremely long-tailed, skewed distributions? - And finally, if one is making a serious analysis - lots of jokes and euphemisms about masturbation and theatrical contempt for the consumers - seem to suggest either discomfort on the part of the author or some kind of motivated reasoning to arrive at their results.
martincmartin 5y ago
To be pedantic, a median is not a ratio. That's the average.
- mrpf1ster 5y ago
  The statistic he is analyzing here is median revenue per content creator, not just median revenue. The numerator is the median revenue and the denominator is the number of content creators.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Hello71 5y ago
    that's not how medians work. if 100 creators make $100 each, then the median income is $100. if you divide it again by 100, then you'll get $1/creator^2 which is a nonsense number.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Yeah, “numerator” should be “measure” and denominator should be “universe of analysis”, but the criticism was coherent even with the terminological errors. You’ve got the median of an undercount of revenue, across a population padded with an unknown number of not-actively-used accounts, each of which, on its own, would result in an artificially low result compared to the actual value of interest.

by Lazare 5y ago

formerly_proven 5y ago

It seems more like a Fermi estimate.

hansvm 5y ago
> I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. > Fermi estimate It's more like a Fermi estimate, but the inputs still probably aren't good enough to be meaningful. E.g., on other set-your-own-hours platforms like doordash, MLM pyramid schemes, and uber it's expected that 99% of the workers won't work more than a few hours per month (this is also a bad Fermi estimate -- could be off by 10x either direction). As a corollary, just taking the $145 and multiplying by 100ish (based also on your definition of full-time) could be a much better estimate for the earnings potential for somebody looking to seriously pursue OnlyFans. Pendantic note: the point here isn't that $14,500 is a better estimate; it's that the magnitude of all the unknowns in trying to compute such a thing is so great that we can't even reach the level of certainty a Fermi approximation provides without more data.

vbtemp 5y ago

Yeah, I read that over too - crap data in, crap analysis, and crap results out. There's a lot that's wrong with the article: - Someone else in this thread correctly highlighted that on stackoverflow, for example, simply having one answer to a question puts you in the top 25th percentile. Most accounts are probably idle or passive or abandoned, so using those to get the result is obviously wrong. Maybe, what are the expected earnings for users investing more than 8 hours/week (purchasing equipment, producing content, editing, publishing, marketing)? - People on this thread need to stop looking at the $145/month figure from the title. It doesn't come from anything. A lot of people are kind of stuck on that. By no means what so ever should it be interpreted as "girls who have only fans make $145/month", which people seem to be doing. Based on the income distribution, virtually no one makes approximately $145/month. It's just an artifact being the quotient of two numbers the author chose. A small-ish proportion of total users make _way more than $145/month_, and a large proportion of the user base (including idle and abandoned accounts) makes pretty much zero. Maybe I'm just broadcasting my lack of statistical knowledge, but I'm struggling to understand what does an average or median even signify for extremely long-tailed, skewed distributions? - And finally, if one is making a serious analysis - lots of jokes and euphemisms about masturbation and theatrical contempt for the consumers - seem to suggest either discomfort on the part of the author or some kind of motivated reasoning to arrive at their results.

martincmartin 5y ago

To be pedantic, a median is not a ratio. That's the average.

mrpf1ster 5y ago
The statistic he is analyzing here is median revenue per content creator, not just median revenue. The numerator is the median revenue and the denominator is the number of content creators.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Hello71 5y ago
  that's not how medians work. if 100 creators make $100 each, then the median income is $100. if you divide it again by 100, then you'll get $1/creator^2 which is a nonsense number.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Yeah, “numerator” should be “measure” and denominator should be “universe of analysis”, but the criticism was coherent even with the terminological errors. You’ve got the median of an undercount of revenue, across a population padded with an unknown number of not-actively-used accounts, each of which, on its own, would result in an artificially low result compared to the actual value of interest.